He spent over an hour consoling Valentina Pastor and left her in the safe hands of two female family liaison officers. This was only the second time in his career he’d had to perform this part of his duties and the emotional impact cut through him like a knife. He knew how painful it was to face the death of the person you loved most in your life.

Vargas climbed wearily into his car, fully intending to drive back to García’s apartment to meet up with Torres. Instead, he found himself heading out towards the outskirts of the city, tears streaming down his face. Forty minutes later he arrived at La Tablada Cemetery, the largest Jewish burial ground in South America, containing over a hundred thousand graves. One of which belonged to his wife.

He trudged, unseeing, through the grounds, following a route he knew all too well. He’d lost Sophia three years before to a savage and rampant brain tumour. His life had fallen apart then, all their dreams and plans cruelly ripped away from him so quickly. His future lost. Vargas knelt down next to his wife’s grave, his body heaving with gut-wrenching sobs. Watching over him like a guardian angel, Sophia’s headstone displayed her picture with her name etched underneath, Sophia Koppel-Vargas, in both Spanish and Hebrew.

Sophia’s paternal grandfather was one of hundreds of thousands of like-minded Jews who fled Nazi Germany in the mid-thirties and headed for South America to begin a new life. Most of them settled in Buenos Aires and, by 1939, half the small manufacturing factories in the city were owned by Jewish immigrants.

Sophia was not orthodox and didn’t practise Judaism but, nevertheless, she was incredibly proud of her heritage. Once a year, on Yom Kippur, she would take Vargas to their local synagogue, where he’d spend the day fasting with her parents and younger sister. He had been born and brought up as a Catholic, but fully embraced the cultural aspects of her religion. She had worked in the city centre as a nursery teacher and he used to love hearing about the small children she cared for. They had planned to have a family of their own but then the tumour came to light and their lives were shattered.

Vargas spent most of the next hour sitting on the ground in front of her grave, weeping like a baby.

* * *

Torres and Martin went back inside the flat and two other officers stayed in one of the Peugeots opposite the front entrance to the block.

“Alex, you spoke to García. What’s he like?”

Martin’s thoughts flashed back to their brief interview at the station.

“The thing is, sir, he was one of about twenty box owners I met after the raid. He was pretty unremarkable. He claimed he regularly visited his box to take out cash to live on and—”